Monthly Report - January 2018

No Abzu, again. But this time it’s because I won a game on SG with Playing Appreciated (you have one month to play the game) and I played that quite a lot (and some Diablo 3, the season is almost over !). Maybe next month ?

First, as usual, new games :

Won on SG : Beholder.
From bundles/free/gifts/sales :Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, Amnesia Collection, We Were Here

We Were Here

3 hours playtime

26 of 26 achievements

We Were Here - completed

I heard about this free game on the Co-optional podcast, they seemed to like it, so as I like a lot escape games (in “real life”), I grabbed a friend and played it.
This is an asymmetric puzzle game : you and your friend are trying to get out of a building. You are not in the same room and use a walkie-talkie to communicate. One player is the “librarian” and has access to information that would help the other player (the “explorer”) solve problems and make them both progress.
The game is quite well done, although a bit buggy. Some puzzles are timed so it’s a bit stressful, it feels a bit like Keep talking and nobody explodes, where you mostly spend time trying to describe what you see or what you think the other player should do.
So you can fail, but there is a checkpoint system which makes the game not really punishing, and it’s good, as replaying the part you already did is not really interesting.
As most escape games, this one has pretty much no replay value (you might want to replay it once, to try the other role, but it will be much quicker as you know the puzzles).
But hey, it’s free and made us want to checkout the sequel, so it did its job pretty well.

Achievements : The achievements are pretty easy, you get most of them on your first playthrough (around 1h-1h30) and you are required to replay it a few times for several ones (but the other playthrough only takes a few minutes).
The only issue we had was the last hidden achievement. We thought it was linked to the ending (some text makes you think there are several alternate endings), but we had to look on the Internet and in fact, it’s just an easter egg that you probably can’t find without knowing it’s there.
If anyone knows how you are supposed to find it without Internet, I’m curious :).

Borderlands 2

128 hours playtime

54 of 69 achievements

Borderlands 2 - beaten

Yep Borderlands again. As expected I finished all the DLCs.

Captain Scarlett and her Pirate’s Booty : nice but a bit disappointing. I liked the Scarlett character but I think she’s not there enough, and I don’t like the ending. As a whole the DLC was quite enjoyable but I expected a bit more.
Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep : awesome DLC. The story is great, the narration is great, the new enemies are nice and challenging, you grab fun weapons (I like the shotgun that fires swords), they exploit the RPG theme combined with Tina’s personality (which I love) and MMOs tropes really well.
Achievements : almost there ! I’m mostly missing the “do all the side quests” of the DLCs, as I need to find friends to do the raid quests, or be level 50 (I’m not there yet), and the character specific achievements as I mostly played the commando.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

24 hours playtime

81 of 95 achievements

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing - beaten

A game I won on SG. This game is really similar to the Torchlight series (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same team) : some animations, colors and mechanics immediately make you think of those games, but without the randomly generated maps element, so this is pretty linear (I have to replay it to see how much randomness there is).
But this is a really hard game. I’m used to play Torchlight or Diablo and found this one way harder from the beginning (I don’t remember which difficulty I chose though). When you start getting items and spells, it becomes a bit more manageable but still requires some skills !
The story is okay (but this is not really important for those games), there are a few “hidden” (not hard to find ^^) things to do that are good surprises and nice easter eggs. I liked Van Helsing’s companion, Katarina and the small chats and comments they have.
Overall I spent some nice time with it, and wanted to finish it.

Achievements : you get a lot of them during your playthrough if you explore things well and do all the side quests. The specific boss achievements are very hard (kill them the hard way) and I failed to get them.
One thing annoying is that you can’t retry the boss later so if you didn’t get an achievement, you have to replay the entire game.
But as some of them require to replay, I’ll try to get them the next time, and be more prepared. I also have to finish it in hardcore mode (this will be scary…)
Sadly, I won’t be able to get all of them, as it requires to have some DLCs and I don’t think it has enough replay value to be worth it (or maybe really cheap on sale ?).

Sid Meier's Civilization VI

12 hours playtime

6 of 191 achievements

Sid Meier's Civilization VI - unfinished

Got this one with the early unlock of the Humble Monthly. I’m a bit annoyed because I knew really well how to play CIV 5 and all the conditions, bonuses, etc. but I didn’t play it since years and I lost everything. Moreover Civ 6 did some big changes that I have to relearn (and to play well this one requires to know details about the districts bonuses and requirements and more planification than the previous one). So I don’t know, I played a bit and it was fun, but I don’t think I’ll spend as much time as I did previously to learn all the details.
Achievements : Nope nope nope ! I tried to do as many as I could with Civilization V, and it’s impossible for me, with my kind of playing, to expect having a decent achievement progress, so I won’t even try :).

Magicka

20 hours playtime

31 of 88 achievements

Magicka - unfinished

I played this one years ago and thought that I might try to at least finish the story once. My progress was around half of the game. So I grabbed a friend (the same one ^^) and tried to move forward in the story.
And it was… Disappointing. Very hard, very frustrating; I don’t know if they changed something or if I just forgot everything but it was a real mess and we struggled a lot, I wasn’t able to create the spells I wanted, I constantly did mistakes… We got to a point where the enemies one-shoot you and barely take any damage (the yetis), so this wasn’t fun and just annoying.
Too bad because in my memory this was a really fun game !
Right now, I only have one chapter left but I don’t really want to play it anymore.
Achievements : the counter will probably stay where it is…

Next Month - February

Abzu ? Maybe it’s time for some Abzu finally :).

ABZÛ

0 minutes playtime

0 of 12 achievements